Covid-19 wins the early rounds as Bojo is short of personal protective equipment and unprepared. Bojo is being advised by his corner to play the long game and Covid-19 will start to slow down.

But Covid-19 is still on the front foot, is not slowing down and is landing some killer blows.

Bojo is boxing behind a left jab. The fans are getting impatient, urging Bojo to finish it early. No more dither, no more dather. They want a knock down, they want a knockout and if it takes a forced lockdown so be it.

The left jab’s not working. Time to throw the big right hand.

Name and address supplied

Social care funding

In the Spring Budget Chancellor Rishi Sunak gave no mention of any spending increase for social care.

While the money outlined for NHS and local authorities to deal with Coronavirus is good news, it’s astonishing funding for social care appears to have been completely ignored. This is crushing for people with dementia – including almost 8,000 in Cumbria.

Every day Alzheimer’s Society’s Fix Dementia Care campaign hears of people with dementia trapped in unacceptable conditions, of families struggling to cover the astronomical cost of dementia care. Coronavirus risks making this crisis into a catastrophe.

If we do not fix our broken social care system, the most vulnerable in our society will continue to bear the brunt. Cross-party talks must produce a long term, sustainable solution for social care that delivers quality care, and they absolutely have to be backed by investment now to keep the system afloat.

To show your support, join our Fix Dementia Campaign now at alzheimers.org.uk/fix

HAZEL BAYLEY

Head of Region

Alzheimer’s Society, Carlisle

The sun will come up tomorrow

In spite of the plight most of us are experiencing, I would like you to consider printing my light-hearted letter to encourage people to plant away during the unexpected extra time on their hands.

The happiest memories I have of my childhood are of making a nuisance of myself on my dad’s allotment. Even though my jobs were merely counting seeds and washing out jam and paste jars, I would experiment in mixing seeds up, merely to see what happened next.

Often red veined leaves would sprout up amongst the lettuces and were left to grow into a bulbous beetroot.

I knew I was responsible for many failures, not wanting to thin things out, feeding slugs on purpose in paste jars, but many surprises won the day.

The greatest miracle on earth was watching spring flowers emerge from the blackened lumpy soil. How do they know when to come UP, and when they die, where do they go to?

The inquisitions used to drive my Dad off site to smoke a Woodbine.

However, all his answers took root in my fertile child’s mind. To this day, I often find myself explaining to young children, who think that carrots and clean potatoes only come in a plastic bag from Iceland, that they can make magic from a pot of soil where a little seed is hiding for a while.

In spite of my own tree of knowledge, and memories of hanging baskets filled with green strawberries, windowsills crammed with rosemary and thyme, not ONE of my children was interested in tending to the various gardens we’d had. Wouldn’t lift a finger to dig, wouldn’t tidy or fill the compost heap, expected this mother nature to comply.

Now that they have their own inner city boxes to live in, they would pay a king’s ransom to own a square metre of soil. In their mind’s eye they see a bounty of exotic herbs sprouting from their window boxes, while dreaming of having a field to plough.

The sun will still rise in the morning; the snowdrops are already out.

When all of us think about it, we’ll be ready to start planting out. Anything is possible.

Coun EILEEN WEIR

Whitehaven

What is a community?

In the article “ Talks continue over waste site” (The Whitehaven News, March 18), I enjoyed the carefully prepared line repeated by Coun David Moore, the Conservative deputy mayor of Copeland, that “should any interested party come forward within Copeland, we (CBC) would be in a position to join that working group”.

It persuaded me to re-read the Radioactive Waste Management February 2020 publication entitled “The Siting Process for a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF)”. In that document the words community or communities appear over 100 times but with no clarification as what they mean in the context of a GDF. Remember, the underground area when excavated will be bigger than the land areas of settlements like Whitehaven or Workington and perhaps even of Carlisle.

It appears that what Coun Moore’s comment really means is that if, for example, massive Copeland landowners like United Utilities, Lowther Estates or the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority itself (4,350 acres, including a lot in Copeland) decide to “express an interest” then Copeland Borough Council could engage with them as the only decision making local authority, even if all other parish, town, district and county councils refuse to do so.

A potential “deal” between the big battalions of government, NDA, landowners, Radioactive Waste Management, with a tiny, underfunded borough council cosying up to them is only going to have one outcome. If Coun Moore’s claim really is council policy then any discussions on such issues between either borough council officers or our “independent” elected mayor, his Tory deputy, the NDA/RWM, government and other interested parties should be both minuted and made immediately available to the public.

Remember, a lot of work has gone into pushing our borough into this position, but safety must be paramount and government promises are worth nothing unless they are legally enforceable.

TIM KNOWLES

Frizington